This is Utah Stories fourth annual farm issue. Last year we wrote about two of Utah’s largest grass-fed operations — Redmond Heritage Farms and Canyon Meadows Ranch. Then we wrote about up-and-coming urban farmers and younger first-generation farmers such as Peterson Family Farms. These stories are well worth reading.

This year we have decided to focus on suburban sprawl and its effects on some of Utah’s largest and most successful family farms. But in order to tell these stories properly, we have decided to make them into videos. But we realized in telling these stories they wouldn’t be very effective if they were mostly just talking heads. We considered using Google Earth to show the problem of the encroaching effects of suburbia, but realized that the latest Google earth data is now months old. Then we learned about the new Phantom 4 Drone and its amazing feature — a return-to-home button.

I’m not a pilot and I have no experience in aerial photography, but a drone is an amazing tool to help tell these stories. This video contains a few short clips of what we captured. This month we will be publishing videos on the three farms I visited. We will also be publishing a series of videos on urban gardening.

Utah Stories originally started as a website with videos. We would like to return to this vision and offer far more video content. If you like this video and the idea of Utah Stories offering more video stories, please subscribe to our YouTube Channel.